Board game invasion from the past

When I was too young to know the rules or find friends to play with, I used to love taking all the pieces of my brother’s RISK game and arranging them in battle formations. There were lines of triangle-shaped soldiers defending the Ural region from Irkutsk and “Siam” from Indonesia.

Dork heaven.

Some days I’d take the time to roll the die, pretending to make an actual game of it — killing off sides depending on the roll. But more often than not, I simply pushed the pieces with my hand, crushing them all together in a rainbow soup of carnage and warfare. If there was one game that could keep me occupied and quiet for hours at a time, it was RISK. Later, when I became old enough to play it with others, I reveled in the idea of forming alliances only to break them the moment my “ally” arranged his army against our supposed enemy. This may explain why I generally seemed to play RISK by myself.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I visited SCRAP, a recycling center in San Francisco’s industrial regions (see awesome sewing pattern selections here), and found some old board game that sought to recreate the battle of Waterloo. My daughter and I took out all the pieces and spent a dreary evening last week arranging the pieces into battle lines before using our hands to swamp the enemies.

I thought about teaching her how to play, and then I looked at the instructions. There were five pages of them, single spaced and in 4-point type. They made the rules of Settlers of Catan look like the rules for Candy Land.

Interestingly, the Waterloo game seems like a long-lost ancestor of Settlers of Catan, complete with the hex-shaped board spots and the seemingly endless rules. I’m posting a few pictures here just to see if anyone remembers this game. It seems to have been made in 1975, and although I haven’t waded through all the rules yet, I can tell already it’s going to keep me occupied for a long time.

MIKE ADAMICK writes at Cry It Out: Memoirs of a stay-at-home dad. This also explains why he never got laid.